Since Monday, the death of Bin Laden is saturating the media landscape. The disappearance of the most wanted man on the planet is more spectacular than a real blow to the terrorist organization he was representing. It took nearly 10 years to find the man and countless ways to track him. As for Dudayev, in Chechnya in 2001, it’s a phone call that drove investigators to Bin Laden.

Warris Business website provides details on the techniques that were used to track Bin Laden’s courier:

“At National Journal, Marc Ambinder reports that a combination of “basic criminal forensic techniques and…highly advanced and still-classified technology” were used in the bin Laden hunt.

On Twitter, US Navy veteran Robert Caruso sounds fairly confident that US forces tracked bin Laden’s couriers with some semi-secret surveillance technologies known collectively as TTL. That would make sense, given what’s been made public through the sporadicpressreports and bare-bones disclosures about the TTL “Manhattan Project” over the past few years.

TTL stands for “tagging, tracking and locating”—an accurate description of what the technologies involved are supposed to do. In unclassified documents that reference the program, it’s also referred to as HF-TTL, for “hostile forces” tracking, and CTTL, for “clandestine” or “continuous” tracking.

Based on those code words, W.I.B. compiled the following list of some US military contractors that appear to be involved in the development and deployment of the TTL technologies that may—emphasis on the uncertainty—have been used to find bin Laden.”

But Bin Laden him self was not using any communication means to connect with the outside world; no phones and no internet. When investigators closed on the location of the man in Abbottabad, Pakistan, they were intrigued by a large compound that seemed to be unusually disconnected from the world. A senior U.S. administration official who requested anonymity said it was “noteworthy” that “the property is valued at approximately $1 million but has no telephone or Internet service connected to it.”

The moral of the story is that either being too much connected or totally disconnected, reveals a weakness.

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Cap Falcon

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and cause me to tremble for safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic destroyed.”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, letter to Col. William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864
Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)